Crazy About Check-ins? Now We Have CheckinMania

A new visualization mashup of social location service check-ins just launched last night called Checkinmania.

Checkinmania right now displays recent check-in data from Foursquare and Gowalla (looks like Brightkite and Yelp data is coming soon too), and does it in a smart way – around a point that you choose on a Google Map. This is smart as proximity really matters, and smart apps such as Instant Tweetup are focusing proximity.

There are three other nicely done parts of Checkinmania. First of all, it shows data worldwide – quite a feat. We typed in Santa Barbara, London, Beijing and Singapore and got data back from every city. The second nice part of the visualization is it shows something that we would like to see in Check.in (another “checkin” app that we reviewed earlier today) – it uses the labels that Foursquare and Gowalla use for locations. Especially with Gowalla check-ins, this really looks great – although we’ve heard from a few international sources that some locations are quite off-target (we saw a few small mistakes in the few cities we knew and tested, for instance having a venue on the wrong side of the street, but nothing too major). Finally, when you click on any location – in either Foursquare or Gowalla – the app expands on the location to show you the total number of check-ins, the current mayor or top users (on Foursquare and Gowalla, respectively) and tips and comments that users have left.

This visually appealing (though somewhat lightweight) app does a nice job of expanding on what SimpleGeo’s more real-time Vicarious.ly did at SXSW, going beyond one city to show data globally. While it probably wasn’t very technically hard to create – and somewhat resembles FourWhere which also launched at SXSW (and which we felt was a bit too basic to cover) – Checkinmania is the most complete mashup in this space we’ve seen yet. It will be interesting to see if any of these services continues to build out these mashups or if they will die on the vine as the mania subsides.

Chad Catacchio is a contributor writing on a variety of topics in tech. He has held management positions at a number of tech companies in the US and China.
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